Ohio executions on record pace

Ohio is on pace, once again, to set a modern-day state record for executing the most condemned killers in 1 year.

That’s because the Ohio Supreme Court has scheduled nine executions through October. Among the 7 death sentences announced Tuesday: three Death Row inmates are from Hamilton County and one from Butler County.

Last year, Ohio set a modern record for executions with eight, the most since capital punishment resumed at Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville in 1999. Ohio’s total was second only to Texas, which held 17 executions last year.

“It could be Ohio will surpass all states this year,” said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Washington-based Death Penalty Information Center, a non-profit group critical of capital punishment.

This year, Texas has not had any executions, but plans two later this month.

Meanwhile, state and county prosecutors have asked Ohio’s highest court to schedule executions for up to 8 more of death row’s 157 convicts – including 1 from Clermont County – once their legal appeals are exhausted.

Nationwide, the number of U.S. executions has fallen by about 60 percent since the 1990s. There were 46 executions nationwide last year. Dieter attributes the drop to heightened awareness about wrongful convictions and new state laws allowing juries to consider life in prison without parole instead of a death sentence.

"If anything, it seems other states will be slowing down this year,” Dieter said. “It’s a hard thing on the institution, the prison (and) the guards who do this bunched together."

Supreme Court spokesman Chris Davey acknowledged Tuesday that justices agreed with a recent request from Ohio’s new prisons director, Gary Mohr, to space executions about 30 days apart.

"It would assist us in our performance of this duty,” Mohr wrote in a Jan. 27 letter to Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor.

Ohio officials said that the conclusion of court challenges to lethal injection as cruel and unusual punishment, along with exhausted death-penalty appeals, have resulted in more executions being scheduled this year and last.

The execution dates set Tuesday ended a 3-month break in scheduling by the state Supreme Court following last fall’s execution of Michael Benge, 49, of Butler County.

Locally convicted death row inmates set for execution this year are:

• Clarence Carter, 48, scheduled to die April 12. While awaiting sentencing on a separate murder charge in the jail annex next to the Hamilton County Courthouse, Carter kicked, choked and stomped fellow inmate Johnny Allen. Allen, 33, died two weeks later from head injuries.

• Danny Lee Bedford, 63, scheduled to die May 17. Bedford was sentenced to death for the April 24, 1984, murder of his 25-year-old ex-girlfriend, Gwen Toepfert, and 27-year-old John Smith, who was visiting her apartment. After shooting Toepfert several times with a pistol, Bedford fired a shotgun into her pelvic region, according to court papers.

• Shawn L. Hawkins, 42, scheduled to die June 14. Hawkins was convicted of fatally shooting 18-year-old Terrance Richard and 19-year-old Diamond Marteen as they waited in a car to buy drugs in Mount Healthy. Hawkins also robbed them of money and jewelry during the June 12, 1989, execution-style murders.

• Kenneth Wayne Smith, 45, scheduled to die July 19. On May 12, 1995, Smith, and his older brother, Raleigh Randall Smith, murdered a Hamilton couple during a robbery. Their home was ransacked and money and jewelry taken. Kenneth Smith later told a friend that he beat 58-year-old Lewis Ray, who bled to death from a slash in his neck.

Raleigh Randall Smith was convicted of strangling Ray’s 54-year-old wife, Ruth. “Randy” Smith, who turns 47 on Thursday, is serving a 30-years-to-life sentence at Lebanon Correctional Institution in Warren County.

Meanwhile, prosecutors have asked the Supreme Court to set execution dates in eight additional capital punishment cases, including the murder of a 3-year-old Clermont County boy, killed after his father, Michael D. Webb, now 62, set fire to their house in Batavia on Nov. 20, 1990. Webb’s wife and another son were injured in the fire, which police said was intentionally set for profit.

Source: Cincinnati Enquirer, February 9, 2011

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